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The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Inner
Creativity
Vision
Imagination
Child
Children
Potent
Muse

More quotes by Stephen Nachmanovitch

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As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business I am in the surrender business.
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Practice is an ever-fresh, challenging flow of work and play in which we continually test and demolish our own delusions therefore, it is sometimes painful.
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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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Every moment of life is unique-a kiss, a sunset, a dance, a joke. None will ever recur in quite the same way. Each happens only once in the history of the universe.
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The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.
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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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If the art is created with the whole person, then the work will come out whole. Education must teach, reach, and vibrate the whole person rather than merely transfer knowledge.
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In improvisation, there is only one time. This is what computer people call real time. The time of inspiration, the time of technically structuring and realizing... the time of playing it, and the time of communicating with the audience, are all one.
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Working within the limits of the medium forces us to change our own limits. Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be 'free,' but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves.
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Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much he throws away. Nature, the great creator, is always throwing things away. A frog lays several million eggs at a sitting. Only a few dozen of these become tadpoles, and only a few of those become frogs. We can let imagination and practice be as profligate as nature.
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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
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Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.
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Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.
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There is not ultimate breakthrough what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul.
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Paradoxically, the more you are yourself, the more universal your message. As you develop and individuate more deeply, you break through into deeper layers of the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
Stephen Nachmanovitch